Enough Already

Carolyn B. Healy

I turned on the Today Show this morning for the first time in weeks, and they’re just lucky I was prepared to give them a second chance. I had to put them on probation back on the second day of the Michael Jackson death marathon. If they were going to act like the entire world screeched to a halt just because one exceedingly troubled entertainer died, then they’d have to do it without me. I am not without compassion for M. Jackson, as he was clearly victimized first and repeatedly before he turned his attentions to young boys. I just sought some balance and the slightest recognition that he became a predator himself.

Soon after, I left on a lengthy trip where my morning viewing switched to the cruise director’s daily closed circuit TV show, for which he donned a turban and received a lovely facial from the spa staff, and talked on and on about shopping. I didn’t miss Today at all.

Once back, I needed a week to overcome jet lag, and was finally ready to resume my usual habits. Certainly Today was over the pop star immersion by now and back to actual news. I switched it on. What filled the screen but the entire Duggar family, the reality show crew who unapologetically shows off their incredible flair for reproduction, a 21 person mass seated somehow - they must have bleachers in the living room - around the parents.

“The Duggars are here. And they have an announcement,” the off-screen voiced teased. “We’ll be right back.”

Let’s see…this is the Duggars. Whatever could it be? A cure for a deadly disease? Peace in the Middle East? You got it. They are having another frigging baby. Nothing against the baby, who is blameless in all this, but hardly could be considered fortunate, to show up on the doorstep as child # 19? That poor kid will be working for scraps until the cows come home. They are going to have to assign someone to remember his name.

Mrs. D announced it in her strangely childlike voice, the rest of the family stared vacantly, and Mr. D, a John Edwards lookalike, hitched up his belt and tried to look modest. “We are so excited,“ she warbled, “waiting for our 19th child.” Then they chatted with the eldest son’s new wife, pregnant of course, about their upcoming birth, and the segment was over.

It’s enough to make you look kindly on the Chinese ban on multiple children. And makes you wonder just who is raising whom around the Duggar household. I don’t care if both parents permanently gave up sleeping for the next 15 years, there is no way two people can adequately parent 18, now 19, children.

While Mr and Mrs. D are happily reproducing like rabbits, they conscript their existing children to raise the new ones. It’s like a Ponzi scheme for parenting - invest your sperm and egg in this new opportunity, but skim off the resources of other people to make good on it. And act like everything is fine and dandy.

Back in the day when my husband and I formed our notions about family size there was a concept called Zero Population Growth, an early expression of consciousness about how we use the earth. It was based on the ethic that no one family gets to hog more than their fair share of the resources. ZPG guided us down a logical path - just replace yourself and then do a bang-up job of raising your replacements. Lucky for us, it worked out that we had a son and almost three years later, a daughter, so we could carry out that plan.

It wasn’t that I was so enraptured with the ecological part of the idea, but as an only child who longed hard for a sibling, two children seemed an embarrassment of riches, and I set out to give them scads of attention and intention.

I gradually noticed that while most of our friends planned their families as we did, some other folks out there still cranked out kids like they needed to raise their own field hands. This ZPG thing had a pull, but not for everyone. Of course, many powerful forces were at work - religion, family tradition, culture, competitiveness, repeated tries for a child of the other sex, fertility, medical issues.

I understand that everyone has to chart their own course, and I have absolutely no patience with those in the anti-choice faction who are ready to make everyone else’s reproductive decisions for them. I certainly don‘t want to join their ranks. But I do have some thoughts.

The more I see these giant families like the Duggars lionized, the more I wonder why. The Duggars can‘t stop themselves, and parade their lives on TV, looking back at us with smug smiles. I wonder, when they started all of this way back in the 1980’s, did they have this planned or did they just sit back and let it happen?

In 1997, the McCaughey Family from Iowa produced septuplets on top of their one existing child. In religiously-loaded interviews, they credited themselves with refusing the selective reduction of the number of fetuses that doctors recommended, and credited their prayers for the survival of all the children. Luckily for them, only two of the children have cerebral palsy. Their self-congratulation aside, what does this say about the prayers of other parents whose babies were stillborn, or died days after birth; or the prayers of infertile couples who would give anything to be pregnant with one measly fetus? Were those prayers less valid, less fervent, less worthy?

And just last year, Octomom ,who already had six children, two with special needs, added her eight new babies to the mix. The reaction to her news suggests that we may finally have had enough. As she looked coyly at the camera denying that she was angling for a reality show, the celebrity machinery went wild. While journalists and others climbed all over the lawn and seduced her parents into on-air interviews, ethicists were finally asked to examine the issues involved also.

All these families grant themselves permission that most of us would responsibly deny. Is all of this self-congratulation and self-promotion the final and most tragic expression of our acquisitiveness? The one who dies with the most children wins?
Or is this just a freak show that serves to entertain the rest of us who would never dream of turning out two baseball teams under our very own roofs – a cautionary tale about what happens when excess overtakes reason? If so, we have circled back to M. Jackson and his sadly overblown and XXX life?

Here comes the really touchy part. Internationally, we see reports of countries nearly paralyzed by poverty and disease and scarcity of resources. Yet their average family sizes would put them in the running for a TV show on cable. From here, it looks pretty easy to solve. Apply ZPG and you turn an unmanageable situation into a workable one. Sounds logical to me.

But that brings a minefield of potentially explosive issues. Dare to speak of limiting population and you risk charges of colonialism, racism, classism. But reality is clear - producing too many people makes life harder, and in those extreme situations, even impossible to sustain.

At out house, we did what seemed right and it worked out fine. There is the occasional twinge, wondering what it would have been like to throw ZPG to the winds and be surrounded now by many more children. Just like there is the occasional twinge for others who wonder what it would have been like to mount a huge career, or set aside material comforts and go out to save the world. That is what we get to do as life moves along, review our lives and sort out the hard-won wisdom from the regrets.

All other things being equal, like love and plenty to eat, surely there are riches to be had in enormous families that I will never know. And surely there is a quality of connection in small families that the Duggars will never know.

Now, I have to decide what to do about my relationship with the Today Show. I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll do – I’ll tune back in. I have a curiosity problem. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

CBH 07/09